I hosted a Brokers Open today at a home I have listed. A Brokers Open is an Open House except only agents are invited. The idea is to have other agents see your listing, gather their ideas on marketing, improve their awareness of it and possibly match the home with one of their buyers either now or the near future. The unusual part for me is that I rarely go to them when other agents have them, let alone host one. If I have a possible buyer, I can tell a lot about a home by looking at the info available to me online as a Realtor, and food doesn’t work as an inducement to get me to go anywhere. But two other agents I know and like have listings in the same neighborhood, and so we all hosted ours at the same time to increase the possible turnout. We are all from different offices and areas of town and know different agents to invite. Because of that it was fun as it was a different kind of Brokers Open than you normally see. It was scheduled from 11:30 to 1:30. One home had the appetisers, the other the main course, and I had desserts, which to me was the best of the three to do. If you’ve read earlier posts or the ‘About Me’ page, you know that I like creating things in the kitchen, so the fun part was getting to bake things. I couldn’t decide what to make and I wanted it to be classy, so I called a good friend of mine who is a caterer for ideas. They ended up walking me through the whole thing: possibilities on what to make, how to prepare, serve and present. I can hold my own in my own kitchen, but all the aspects of planning and carrying out an event like this was new to me.
I ended up meeting some other agents I didn’t know which was enjoyable. And I heard some different perspectives on marketing the home which can’t hurt. I’m not confident it will actually produce a buyer. It might…we’ll see. But I have a whole lot of extra chocolate cheesecake and chocolate-pecan crunch bars left over!
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